RoofersCoffeeShop® RCS Influencer Charles Antis says to work with employees on compensation for personal phone use.

July 10, 2018

RCS Influencer Charles Antis recommends that you allow the flexibility of your employees to choose whether or not they want to use your phone or have their own.

Charles states, “If the phone is needed to perform at the work and you’re going to need to call somebody offsite and they need to answer that phone, then you should compensate for that phone. How do you compensate? This is evolved too. If it was five or ten years ago I would say you pick a plan, you make sure everyone has one of your phones. That way you control it. Today with software and the compatibility of phones, you can get your software in your data plan that you’re using. You can download the software you’re using for your apps, for your phones, for your storage of pictures and you can put it onto anybody’s phone.”

Charles Antis is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing. See his full bio here

Full transcription:

Good day, Roofers Coffee Shop, this is Charles Antis with Antis Roofing in Irvine, California. And today’s question is about cell phone use. What are your cell phone policies? Do you have them in your company?

Wow, that just set me on a whole memory hole I went down and I remembered cell phones. I remember in the roofing business before we had them and then I remember like, do you remember when the first person you know had a cell phone, how proud they were. And they were like, “Hello?” Do you remember the big brick? I remember that. And I remember some of the abuse problems in the beginning, like 25 years ago. You’d give somebody a cell phone that you don’t know, as a new employee, they could tack up $500 in long distance bills overnight, that you were left hanging. But a lot has changed about cell phones in the last 20 years.

In fact, plans are very well regulated and you can get the carriers, the providers, to do all the work for you. For example, if you can have limits on the storage that you have for the data plans for the phone. And you can have spend limits, and by doing that you can mitigate some of that risk. I think one of the best ways that I use when I think of a phone is, some companies don’t want to pay for cell phones because we hardly ever use it. But consider this, if you use their phone at all, then you should consider paying it. I always go to this, long ago I learned that I needed to make sense. So, if something wasn’t fair, I would tell my employees, tell me where it’s not fair. And in that vein we discovered something about trucks and cars. If an employee’s using their transportation just to get to work, then we don’t compensate them. But if they use their truck as a tool at all to carry any other people or equipment, then we pay for it.

So, if the phone is needed to perform at the work and you’re going to need to call somebody offsite and they need to answer that phone, then you should compensate for that phone. How do you compensate? This is evolved too. If it was five or ten years ago I would say you pick a plan, you make sure everyone has one of your phones. That way you control it. Today with software and the compatibility of phones, you can get your software in your data plan that you’re using. You can download the software you’re using for your apps, for your phones, for your storage of pictures and you can put it onto anybody’s phone. So therefore I would recommend that you allow the flexibility of your employees to choose whether or not they want to use your phone or have their own. Because there’s no sense in requiring somebody to have two phones. That’s just a wasteful idea.

I would say another thing about phones that used to be the case. It used to be the case that we worried about our employees when they were on their phones when they were not working. I believe that the work gets done, speaks for itself. But I can tell you this. A lot of the people that are on their phones during the day are your brand protectors. They’re the ones that are commenting and lifting up and protecting your brand. With all your other stake-holders out there, your employees are the most important. So, I wouldn’t worry about phone use unless you’re noticing that the expectations of their jobs are not being completed. So, that’s about where I’m at. Don’t worry too much about, you can control a lot with the plans that you have with your provider and I would say phones are cheap. This is a really good spend, you get great value. So, invest in a plan, then make it available to all your employees and learn to say yes.